Liminal Thoughts

1. Notes on Stephen Dedalus  Poets are, after all, ordinary people. Rimbaud ended his life as a merchant and "bourgeois trafficker"; one suspects that Keats and Shelley, had they not died young, would have ended up much the same. Art is always being intruded upon by gross, indecent life. The need to pay the bills, to eat and expel, to gratify our base sexual urges, inevitably crowds out whatever momentary epiphanies we have had; in the long run it threatens to swallow them up whole. This does not have to result in a spiritual (or literal) suicide, though often enough and tragically it does. What it does manifest as is perpetual despair. When we first meet Stephen, he is in the throes of this: guilt-ridden, destitute, locked out of his home. His mind teems with philosophic and poetic ideas, but these invariably run into dead-ends. He is frustrated for a variety of reasons, but perhaps most prominently the immaturity of his abilities. It is not yet the moment for his success; h...

Val d'Orcia, Tuscany, 25 September 2022  Even in this golden and sun-stained land, Drunk and drenched in antiquity, The violence of history suffocates me. What is this place if not a mirage, age Upon age of hatreds piled, a crooked Spire erupting in space? Nothing new Can flower here.                                         If I could draw water  From this rock, if I could endow this dust With life, this discontent might be redeemed. This will never come to be. The sky, the sun, are much too vast to care For the miserable strivings of men. As soon as I speak I know it is done. I cry and I rage but nothing else comes.

I would like to write something more optimistic, now that spring is here. Winter made me too severe. Severity has its uses - it clarifies, sharpens the mind - but in excess it leads to narrowness, dogmatism, radicalization. One cannot be like Flaubert's Senecal, whose doctrinaire revolutionism seemed inexorably to lead to militant reaction. There has to be a happy middle. Besides, how can one not feel some optimism at this time of year? The days are getting warmer, the sun is out longer. Even last week's "snow emergency" seemed, in its aftermath, somehow milder, more cheerful than those that had come before - the birds were out chirping immediately after. There is something poignant, too ephemeral, about spring snow (we have had two beloved cats die in early spring); but in its thaw and glisten, in its quickness to melt, in the little rivulets of water one sees running through the streets, one believes again in the primacy of life over death. I sat at the window and w...

 Something small but meaningful I try to do: memorialize the small animals (mice, birds, insects) that die in and around our house - in some cases because we have killed them. Even the smallest, least significant creature, even a worm, deserves this recognition. 

I haven't wanted to use this blog to comment directly on current events - I rarely feel that I have anything to add to the "discourse" that someone with more insight and a larger platform hasn't already said, and I simply don't have the time and energy to try to keep up with everything that is going on. But it is often impossible to think of anything else; and one contribution that I feel I can legitimately make is to offer an account, at least occasionally, of what it "feels like" to be living through this period - from a certain point of view, of course, but a point of view that is held enough in common with my milieu (liberal, educated, PMC) that I feel there might be something gained in articulating it for others. What follows is a handful of thoughts and impressions I wrote down toward the end of January, in an attempt to express the distress I felt at the news coming out of Minneapolis. These are fragmentary and inadequate; I thought about compilin...

We might expect libertarians to be against the authoritarian takeover of our country, since their primary concern is, by definition, "freedom"; but in fact there are many who appear to be undisturbed by it, permissive toward it, and even willing to carry water for it, so long as it quashes their mortal enemies on "the left" - often enough as not, a phantom of their own imagining. What is characteristic about this sort of libertarian is that their "philosophy" - if it is even worthy of the name - is dispositional rather than principled; that is, it arises from an emotional commitment to their own comfort and self-interest, over and above any consideration for the needs of others - except for those whose powers they covet or fear. Such people do not believe, at base, that they owe anything to anyone else; those who are financially comfortable, and a little less hard-hearted, are willing to pay their taxes, but beyond that they balk at appeals to solidarity a...